Twitter Archive: Datasift Selling 2 Years of Searchable Tweets

The past two years of Twitter data has been archived and is now available for firms wanting to analyse tweets to identify trends in market sentiment or plan marketing campaigns.

The archive, called Historics, includes filtering and search capabilities. It was revealed this week by UK firm Datasift.

Businesses are expected to use Historics to see how their brand is being perceived on social networks, said Datasift chief marketing officer Tim Barker. He said the firm had been working on the offering for two years in partnership with Twitter.

"It's not only the two years of 140 character tweets we will be offering in the archive, but we will be [including] information on users' location, or with information on the links that that they posted in tweets, for example," Barker said. "Companies have analyzed data off Twitter before but they don't get details of locations and sentiment. In any case this is the first time a two-year archive of tweets has been made readily available as a service for businesses."

In 2010, Twitter donated an archive of all the tweets ever made on Twitter since its founding in 2006 to the U.S. Library of Congress, but the tweets can only be accessed after a six-month delay and for non-commercial research purposes.

Barker said Datasift had 1,000 companies already on the waiting list for the Historics platform, including 200 of the Fortune 500 companies.

"We have been absolutely inundated by interested companies," he added.

The cost of Historics will depend how far back in historic tweets a business wants to go.

On the Datasift website, there are a number of bundles on offer, ranging from $1,000 per month for a 'lite' offering to $15,000 per month for companies wanting access to more data.

Datasift was founded by Nick Halstead, who previously founded Tweetmeme, a free third-party Twitter service that allowed companies to search Twitter and find the most popular links on the social network before such capabilities became available on Twitter itself.

"Halstead realised when founding Tweetmeme that companies wanted to get access to historic tweets dating far back, and now this has become a reality," said Barker.

Barker said he did not expect there to be privacy concerns about the platform.

"Every social network has to be diligent about privacy of course but Twitter was created to be open and to be valuable to research and development," he said. "Also, if a user deletes a Tweet, it gets deleted from our service and will not be passed on to businesses."